Ted Warren's ruminations on teaching, playing, writing, and listening. And also pizza.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Rudiment of the week!

Hey everyone,

There has been a lot of talk back and forth about rudiments lately with my fellow bloggers. In honour of that, I have decided every week I will take one of the 40 international drum rudiments and try to see what I can do with it. Everyone can follow along at home, or try one of your own.

This week I picked the double drag tap.

It looks like this:

I picked this for a couple of reasons. One, I hardly ever use drag or ruff ideas and two, I feel that mine could use a lot of work.

I worked on it for about an hour today. First I played it as is, being careful to play it marching style (ruffs as 2 distinct notes) and classical style (ruffs as short buzzes).

Then I tried playing light four on the bass drum and high-hat on 2 and 4, sung a standard tune (Softly as in a Morning Sunrise if I recall correctly) and played the drag as:

-continuous 8th notes, creating a 3 8th note figure.

-quarter note triplets, so the above example would take 1 bar to complete.

Next I moved the accented note to the toms and played the rest on the snare.

Then I put the accented note on the bass drum, rest of drag on the snare.

Then accented note on hi-hat, rest on snare.

Accented note on open hi-hat/bass drum double stop, rest on snare.

Right hand on floor tom, left hand on snare or small tom, ruffs on bass drum.

Same as one before it but ruffs on Hi-Hat with foot. (I had to play the rudiment as quarter notes and at a medium tempo I could still barely manage it.)